Why membership talks don’t quite live up to the Copenhagen rhetoric

HISTORIC, epoch-making, momentous…expect to read these words a lot in the days and weeks after the Copenhagen summit as journalists rifle through their thesauruses in search of suitably solemn ways to describe the importance of the EU’s biggest-ever enlargement.

The end of the Cold War, the tearing down of the Iron Curtain, the reunification of Europe…expect also to be bombarded by these phrases as politicians attempt to sell the decision to invite ten largely ex-Communist states into the 15-member bloc.

For once, neither hacks nor politicos will be guilty of exaggerating.

If all goes to plan in the Danish capital, Europe is set to be whole, free and united for the first time in its long and bloody history.

Some 450 million people, from Belfast to the borders of Belarus, will share common values, common rules and, more often than not, common frontiers.

And in one fell swoop, the EU will become the world’s largest economic power, its biggest free-trade club and the only serious rival to the United States on the world stage.

“After more than four years of intensive talks and many more years of preparations, we are now witnessing history being made,” wrote the prime ministers of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic on the eve of the Copenhagen summit.

However, as membership talks entered their penultimate stage in Brussels last night, there was little sense of history in the making.

Instead, the Danish presidency warned candidate countries not to expect any more money at the

12-13 December meeting; central and east European foreign ministers grumbled about being presented with a ‘diktat’ and Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen was forced to answer reporters’ questions about quotas for suckling cows (“they are very important animals, they don’t produce milk, but they do produce money”, was the German’s sarcastic reply.)

The enlargement negotiations with Cyprus, Malta and the eight former Eastern bloc countries have shown the European Union in its worst light – mean, conservative, self-obsessed, patronising and painfully slow to act.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, yet it was not until 1993 that EU states laid down the conditions for entry, not until 1998 that membership talks started with six states and not until a year later that a further six countries were invited to the negotiating table. Even when it became glaringly obvious that the Union was set to almost double in size, EU leaders were incapable of radically reforming the way the western European club operates.

At Nice, they ducked many of the most difficult questions about how to improve the EU’s Byzantine decision-making procedures – these issues are only now being addressed in the Convention on the future of Europe.

And in Brussels in October, they ruled out any major reform of the Union’s biggest white elephant – the Common Agricultural Policy – until 2013. But the EU has not only failed its citizens by neglecting to carry out the most basic spring-cleaning needed to prepare for enlargement.

More importantly, it has failed the people of central and eastern Europe, who spent almost half a century under the yoke of Nazism and Communism, only to be told: “Wait your turn, don’t argue too much, accept what you’re offered and be grateful for what you’re given.”

From the start of the negotiations, the applicant countries have been treated like second-class states.

Their citizens will have to wait seven years until they are allowed to work freely in all member states. Their farmers will have to wait a decade until they are entitled to receive the same extravagant subsidies western farmers have enjoyed for the past 45 years.

And their poorest regions will never get their hands on the vast sums of money Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal siphoned off during the years when they were the Union’s basket-case members.

In the inevitable euphoria that is likely to follow the Copenhagen meeting, both member states and candidate countries should remember that until this week, enlargement has been decided by governments. It is now time for parliaments and ordinary people to give their verdict.

Despite their distaste with the financing deal expected to be rubber-stamped in Denmark, no one expects elected politicians in either western or central Europe to vote down the EU’s landmark project.

But voters in the candidate countries might not be as charitable when they rush to polling stations in the spring. They have every reason to feel disappointed, distrustful and disillusioned, because a project that started almost a decade ago with the noble aim of healing the continent’s post-war divisions, has re-opened old wounds and left millions of central and eastern Europeans scarred in the process.